Albrecht’s state, Missouri, is divided into a number of distinct rainfall regions.  The northwestern part is grassy prairie and receives much less moisture than the humid, forested southeastern section.  If soil tests were compared across a diagonal line drawn from the northwest to the southeast, they would exactly mimic the climate-caused mineral profile differences Albrecht had identified.  Not unexpectedly, 200 young men per 1,000 draftees were medically unfit for military service from the northwest part of Missouri while 400 per 1,000 were unfit from the southeastern part.  And 300 per 1,000 were unfit from the center of the state.

Another interesting, and rather frightening, conclusion can be drawn from the second chart.  Please notice that by increasing the amount of potassium in the potting soil, Albrecht increased the overall yield by 25 percent while simultaneously lowering all of the other significant nutritional aspects.  Most of this increase of yield was in the form of carbohydrates, that in a food crops equates to calories.  Agronomists also know that adding potassium fertilizer greatly and inexpensively increases yield.  So American farm soils are routinely dosed with potassium fertilizer, increasing bulk yield and profits without consideration for nutrition, or for the ultimate costs in public health.  Organic farmers often do not understand this aspect of plant nutrition either and may use “organic” forms of potassium to increase their yields and profits.  Buying organically grown food is no guarantee that it contains the ultimate in nutrition.

So, if health comes from paying attention to the ratio of nutrition to calories in our food, then as gardeners who are in charge of creating a significant amount of our own fodder, we can take that equation a step further: 

HEALTH = Nutrition/Calories = Calcium/Potassium

When we decide how to manage our gardens we can take steps to imitate dryland soils by keeping potassium levels lower while maintaining higher levels of calcium.

Now take another close look at the third chart.  Average vegetation from dryland soils contains slightly more potassium than calcium (1.2:1) while average vegetation from wetland soils contains many more times more potassium than calcium (4.5:1).  When we import manure or vegetation into our garden or farm soils we are adding large quantities of potassium.  Those of us living in rainy climates that were naturally forested have it much worse in this respect than those of us gardening on the prairies or growing irrigated gardens in desert climates because the very vegetation and manure we use to “build up” our gardens contains much more potassium while most of our soils already contain all we need and then some.

It should be clear to you now why some organic gardeners receive the soil tests like the man at my lecture.  Even the soil tester, although scientifically trained and university educated, did not appreciate the actual source of the potassium overdose.  The tester concluded it must have been wood ashes when actually the potassium came from organic matter itself.